Book 1 of My Struggle gave us two extended episodes from relatively early in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s life. Book 2 skips backward and forward in time and deals with the more recent past. Knausgaard is keeping us a bit off guard—we aren’t always quite sure where we are in the stack of nested memories. The fact that the chronological distance between the telling and the tale has decreased can also be a bit disorienting, because whatever distance there is is not enough to confer a proper sense of retrospective—this cannot be an older wiser man writing about his younger self. If the author is in fact any wiser it’s because he is writing and contemplating rather than acting. Who isn’t a bit wiser when they aren’t actually functioning in a social situation?
There’s a kind of convivial hum to Knausgaard’s writing that I enjoy very much. His books are good company, largely because he’s writing about everyday life. He’s talking about the kinds of thing we talk about with our friends. I wonder if the real Karl Ove Knausgaard is such good company? I would suspect not; I would also suspect that Karl Ove is of the same opinion.
Knausgaard is actually a seething, uncomfortable, impatient man (according to Knausgaard the author at any rate), and when he is in a social setting he is always wishing he could be home writing. He has a confidence and clarity as a writer that he lacks as a man. His bold experiment is to escape from his life only to return to it on the page. He goes out through the front door only to stand in the bushes and look in through the window. He escapes from his life in order to write about nothing else, with the paradoxical intention of making it as real and immediate as possible.
I, for my part, never looked forward to anything except the moment the office door closed behind me and I was alone and able to write. Especially now that after six years of failure I had finally got somewhere and I felt it wouldn’t stop here, there was more. That was what I longed for, this filled my thoughts, not Linda and Vanja and the christening in Jølster, which I took as it came. If it was good, fine, then it was good. If it wasn’t good, well, then it wasn’t good. The difference did not matter much to me. I should have been able to categorize the argument in this way, but I couldn’t, my feelings were too strong, they had me under their control.
What must Knausgaard’s wife (Linda, herself a writer) think of all this? I believe they are still married and recently had a fourth child. He as much as tells us he finds his family a chore. But as soon as he gets behind that closed door, where is his mind? With his family, recounting everything he has seen, thought, and felt. And it isn’t pure narcissism because he doesn’t write only about himself—other people, friends and family, have substance on the page. Perhaps not as they would wish to be seen, but with weight, depth, and nuance nonetheless.
Here he is on choosing a DVD at the video store:
I ran my eye along the row. When I bought films it was always with the idea that they should broaden my horizons. They should have their own special imagery I could assimilate, or forge a relationship with places whose potential I hadn’t considered or be set in an unfamiliar time or culture. In short, I chose films for all the wrong reasons, because when evening came and we wanted to see one of them we could never be bothered to watch two hours of some Japanese event from the 1960s in black and white, or the great, open expanses of Rome’s suburbs where the only thing that happened was that some stunningly beautiful people met who were fundamentally alienated from the world, as tended to be the case with films of that era. No, when evening came and we sat down to watch a film we wanted to be entertained. And it had to be with as little effort and inconvenience as possible. It was the same with everything. I hardly read books anymore; if there was a newspaper around I would prefer to read that. And the threshold just kept rising. It was idiotic because this life gave you nothing, it only made time pass. If we saw a good film it stirred us and set things in motion, for that is how it is, the world is always the same, it is the way we view it that changes. Everyday life, which could bear down on us like a foot treading on a head, could also transport us with delight. Everything depended on the seeing eye. If the eye saw the water that was everywhere in Tarkovsky’s films—for example, which changed the world into a kind of terrarium, where everything trickled and ran, floated and drifted, where all the characters could melt away from the picture and only coffee cups on a table were left, filling slowly with the falling rain, against a background of intense, almost menacing green vegetation, yes—then the eye would also be able to see the same wild, existential depths unfold in everyday life. For we were flesh and blood, sinew and bone, around us plants and trees grew, insects buzzed, birds flew, clouds drifted, rain fell. The eye that gave meaning to the world was a constant possibility, but we almost always decided against it, at least it was like that in our lives.
"Are we up for Stalker?” I asked, turning to her.
In a book of essays this would be thought provoking; in a novel about everyday life, juxtaposed to day care and cigarette breaks, it is a revelation. It’s conversational in a way that is always just a little beyond our ability to articulate in real time, and probably also just a little beyond any real acquaintence's willingness to stand there and listen.
Well, there are still four volumes to go. Most are in the 300-600 page range; volume six, though, is 1300 pages. If I live long enough, I’ll get there.
Meanwhile, here is one last long quote from volume two, which gives us Knausgaard’s explanation of his objective in My Struggle:
Over recent years, I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs, and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news, and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis. I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it was the same. The sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different drove you to a despair. I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every single sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up.
I actually don’t believe any of this for a second. “Actually happened” is meaningless, because “reality” only matters insofar as it makes a difference in our lives. It matters to me whether the people I know are still here when I wake up tomorrow, and it matters to me whether the plane I get on next month has been correctly inspected and maintained, but as to whether some chain-smoking Norwegian is making up stories or telling me exactly what he thinks happened in his life, I really don’t care. But he cares, and it seems to have driven him to write some very interesting books, so I say “Rage on, Karl Ove.”
